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Quick and always available FPO Images

When creating LOTS of websites, it is often not nearly as seamless a handoff as the project plan would hope for. Often times developers need to use For Placement Only (FPO) images to complete the build before the actual creative assets are finalized and approved. These are images that are meant only to hold open a space in designs and be obvious about it.

A risk that developer run into is that if they are missing an image (say a picture of a product in an ecommerce store), they will often just re-use the same images so that something shows up. The risk here is that if the images are similar, it becomes very easy to overlook details and believe that the developer has all the assets they need when they are actually missing some.

FPOImg has a great solve for this. It allows developers to put in FPO images without actually needing the creative asset files. Just drop the URL in as the source, adjust the dimensions (WxH) and voila! An instant, custom sized FPO image. This makes much easier to spot missing creative assets during internal reviews while providing developers the assets the exact size they need.

The only thing to note here is that this tool should only be used for content images and not for design element images. It’s great to have FPO products all over a catalog while they are still being shot. It is a bad idea to have FPO images for the UI design elements as those are usually structural in nature and changing those may have an impact on the code.